Tag: reviews platform

Managing an online store is tough. The competition is massive and the online market is increasingly crowded. Major retailers dominate the scene (think Amazon, Alibaba and eBay) and if you are a small store starting out it’s challenging trying to find your space on large marketplaces like Etsy or eBay. So how can you find your niche and work to improve both your conversion rates and your sales? There is no simple answer but the tips below are a good start.

This is arguably the most important point for making sure an online business succeeds. With a crowded arena it is incredibly important to figure out who you are and why your offering stands out. Doug Hall of Eureka Ranch has distilled this into 3 laws of business: 1) Overt benefit; 2) Real Reason to Believe; 3) Dramatic Difference. Overt benefit basically means focusing on the major benefit your customer can gain from your product or service. It’s no good falling in love with a cool design or great technology. It’s important to stay benefit focused and to make sure that it is obvious so your customers can easily understand your business’s value.

If you are trying to grow your business it’s likely that you’ve spent a good deal of your time on marketing. It’s also pretty likely that a large proportion of that time has been designated to content marketing. Creating the right content – content that is unique, creative, on brand and targeted in just the right way – can give your business a huge boost and help keep your users stay engaged. But how can you take content that is “ok” or “good” and transform it into content that is truly “great”. We’ve prepared a few key tips below.

Build up creativity through consistency and planning

It might not sound super inspiring but being consistent is absolutely essential. Your content reflects your brand and keeping things on brand means keeping them consistent across platforms and in terms of timing. It’s no good having super creative frequent content one week and then badly written sparse content the next. So start by putting together a plan. Creativity doesn’t need to be a Eureka moment or an off-the-cuff brainstorm, it can actually be something you build up and structure. For some great advice about how to do that take a look at this video from Craig Wynett, Chief Innovation Officer at P&G.

Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/smemon/4855136300

Don’t do it alone

You don’t need to do everything on your own. One great way to widen your pool of content is to introduce “guest” or “expert” writers. Staying true to your brand while showing different perspectives can really help to enrich your content. And don’t forget – content is not just what comes from your brand directly. It includes articles about your business (which can be easily shared and promoted across platforms) and perhaps even more importantly, it includes everything your users say about you.

How is tech going to change and grow in near future and what will the future of tech look like in ten or twenty years? According to Jeff Pulver, VOIP expert, the future will look a lot more like Star Trek then we might expect. In a recent talk he described typing and interacting with apps the way we do in 2017 as something that will soon become obsolete. So what will our digital interactions look like? Well, as VR and AR gain technological prowess and voice analytics improve; the future looks set to look like a lot like science fiction. If you’ve watched Star Trek then you are familiar with the concept of a ship that works primarily through voice commands and a “holodeck” where crewmembers have immersive VR experiences. We might not be ready for intergalactic space flight quite yet, but the digital interactions are already moving in this direction.

Many of the gadgets seen on episodes of Star Trek already exist. We already have tablet computers, universal translator apps and more. But the future looks set to combine many of today’s emerging technologies for a more intuitive and interactive digital experience. Gesture technology and voice technology point the way towards control decks and control hubs that can be commanded much as the Captains of the Enterprise commanded theirs. And if it sounds like nothing but science fiction to you, just check out RoomE’s hi-tech voice and motion controls. Today this kind of control panel is a one off, lab-based experiment, but soon enough we can expect to see these kinds of digital interfaces in our homes and workplaces.

There are so many ways to advertise a business digitally. From sponsored content to banner ads, native advertising and social media campaigns, businesses’ biggest challenge is figuring out which channels are best and how to target users through them in the most effective way. In a world that is crowded with digital advertising and content options, UGC stands out as something far more organic and authentic. Rather than “hearing” the voice of a brand explain why a service or product is best, UGC is much closer to receiving a personal recommendation from a friend or a relative, and this feeling of UGC being both personal and authentic makes it a very powerful tool to increase sales.

If you are looking to monetize your website or blog, then there are so many different types of advertisements to choose from. You can run paid banner ads, popups, retargeting email campaigns through your website or blog. You can run ads, boosted content or sponsored stories across social media. You can create sponsored content in the form of articles or guest blogs, and the list goes on. But one mode of advertising really stands out – native advertising.

It’s 2017 and we are being constantly bombarded by ads. We see a pop up on every page we visit, there are banner ads on the sides of the blogs we read. When we log onto social media a large proportion of what we see is sponsored, and when we search Google the first few results are always advertisements. At a certain point we start to block out the advertising “noise”. There’s too much of it and a lot of it just isn’t relevant to our lives.

In recent years, ad campaigns have focused on targeting the “right” segment of users. Using this logic, the total group of potential customers of any business is split up into different segments often based on demographic or psychographic qualities. Take Instagram for example. If you want to create a campaign you can pick out your target segment by choosing their age, gender, location and up to 10 interests. On Facebook you can go into even greater depth in terms of interests but the overall logic is the same. Once a segment is chosen, material is targeted specifically towards them. For example if you are a sports brand with a segment of 18-40 year olds based in Manhattan with an interest in sport you can send them ads about a new activewear line for young people that is about to launch in New York. And though this is much more effective than just blanket targeting everyone with ads, but it doesn’t give us the full picture about our customers.

E-commerce is a booming industry. Last year worldwide sales reached nearly 2 trillion USD. If you have a product or service to sell, e-commerce is an increasingly popular option and often preferred to brick-and-mortar stores. And even if you have a brick-and-mortar store, e-commerce is a great way to reach more customers and minimize expenses online, in addition to your on-the-ground business. But though it may be cheaper than physically renting a store and bulk buying materials, e-commerce comes with its own challenges.

Some of the biggest challenges in e-commerce focus on converting traffic to sales. If you have a great website, amazing UX and are managing to get visitors to your site, that doesn’t guarantee that those visitors will buy. And along the purchasing process, there are some key places that people tend to get lost. One of the biggest issues is shopping cart abandonment. It’s estimated that online stores lose roughly 67% of sales due to shopping cart abandonment, and it can happen for a number of reasons. A major problem is issues with the UX, an overly long or complex process, or simply adding hidden fees and costs later on in the process.

In this blog we will focus on some great tips from bigcommerce.com that can help you improve your sales. For the full article from bigcommerce.com, click here.

Before you delve into solutions and improvements, it is important to fully understand what the main problems on your online store are. Every business is different and there is no better way to understand conversion rates than consistently track and monitor them. Some great ways to do this are by using online tools such as Inspectlet, Mixpanel or CrazyEgg. These types of tools can give you detailed information on user sessions, clicks and more. It’s also a good idea to start out with Google Analytics so you can easily track visitor data like how many visitors actually convert and how long they stay on your site. If you use BigCommerce, you will see that they have their very own built-in analytics solution that allows you to easily track details on shopping cart abandonment. Once you see where the key problems are, you can better focus on solving them.

User-generated content or UGC is crucial for creating buzz around your business. In fact, consumer reviews are trusted 12 times more than marketing or descriptions that come from brands themselves. The big difference between traditional advertising and reviews is authenticity. Reading a customer review is that much more convincing because you know the person who wrote the review is not an employee or advertising executive; they are another user who is genuinely excited over the brand and what it has to offer. Of course, authenticity relies on the fact that your reviews are real. So, if a user suspects fake reviews, the overall effectiveness will be lower.

If you have your own blog then you know there are a thousand and one things to worry about. Are you marketing it correctly? Are you using the right channels to advertise? Are your posts interesting and relevant? Is your design the best it can be? After a while a blog can seem like a pretty long checklist of items that are difficult to keep track of. And things can get pretty expensive, pretty quickly. Blog and web design does not come cheap, nor do new logos, paid marketing campaigns or the like. But the good news is, there are lots of simple things you can do that won’t cost you a penny and will help you radically improve your blog.

According to the New York Times, 95% of blogs fail. To avoid becoming part of this statistic, focus on what really matters – growing your readership. There is sadly no tried and tested formula to magically grow from 0 to 1 million but there are some straightforward (and free) things you can do. Publishing more content is one proven way to grow your readership. Keeping your writing unique and high quality is essential (so you can’t simply increase the frequency but reduce the quality). Starting to sound expensive? Not necessarily. One tip for generating more content is to keep track of what inspires you. Get a notebook or an app you like and write down every inspiring article, quote or thought you have. Keeping these ideas organized and within reach at all times is a great way to convert a higher proportion of your good ideas to awesome content. Another way to increase the frequency of content (for free) is to feature guest bloggers. And this is something that works both ways – you can feature other bloggers on your site, and send your own articles to other blogging sites for even greater exposure.

Have a clear call to action

Blogs aren’t all about the content. One of the best ways to grow a readership is to actively engage with your readers and work to build an online community. One great way to do this is to create clear calls to action so people don’t just read and leave. Decide how you want to engage with your users; for example through a comments section, through an online poll or by inviting guest submission, and make it crystal clear to readers that this is how they can take an active part in your blog. If your call to action is simply requesting social media shares, make sure it is easy and obvious for readers to do so.

Make your comments amazing

We all know comments are important. They generate a constant stream of user content. Every comment is unique and free. Best of all, it is much easier to gain user generated content then actively manage a new advertising campaign or double your blog output. Simply put, high-quality user-generated content is low hanging fruit and you should focus on how to leverage it. So, how can you significantly improve your comments? For starters, if you are currently using the native comments platform on your blog – there is a better way. Today there are a whole host of unique commenting platforms that can radically transform the way you interact with users. One of the best ways to do this is to go beyond text. For a long time comments have been almost exclusively text-based (apart from the occasional emoji or meme) but there is a better way. Voice, image and video commenting can help increase user engagement and make your blog stand out. Voice in particular is a great way to create a much more personal interaction, and best of all you can do it without spending a single dollar.

Heyoya is a game-changing comments and reviews platform that brings voice to e-publishers and e-stores, improving sales and user engagement by allowing readers to express themselves beyond the medium of text. Heyoya’s new Receiver plan allows for quick and easy below-the-fold monetization through native advertising. Heyoya is a game changer for websites and is proven to increase brand affinity and the quality of user-generated content.

Building a solid reputation is hard. There is no quick way or easy recipe to do it and every business is different. Building up a good reputation takes time and hard work, yet losing or destroying one can basically happen over night (just think of the recent United fiasco). In fact, the whole concept of a reputation is pretty amorphous. Ultimately it is not something you as a business can fully shape or control, and often the process of influencing is referred to as “reputation management” since at the end of the day it is about altering or managing other people’s perceptions.

The other issue with reputation is that it is intangible and therefore extremely difficult to measure. In fact, a US survey found that 95% of CEOs think reputation is incredibly important but only 19% have a system in place to measure it. Ultimately today’s market and market value are made up of a range of intangible things like reputation and other qualities (just think of brand equity or intellectual capital). So what can you do to nurture and maintain vulnerable assets like reputation and make sure they leave your business stronger?

Source: http://www.picserver.org/r/

Tap into top influencers

However good you are and however good you say you are, there is a limit to how far your product and marketing can go alone. At some point you need the help of other people, and who better than influencers in your target market who can not only help you reach a wider customer base but also build up your reputation. One way influencers can do this is through the halo effect. The halo effect is essentially when the positive attributes or qualities of one thing rub off onto another thing. On the business level this means that if an edgy and outspoken celebrity influencer starts saying great things about your brand, your brand may gain a reputation of being edgy and outspoken. This is why it is so important to pick the right influencers. The best are those that strongly display the core brand values of your business.

So how can you make the most of your reviews? For starters – engage! It’s all well and good collecting reviews of your organization and displaying them on your webpage or online store. Yes, they are a tool that can help your business build a reputation. However, reviews are even more effective when they become dynamic. If someone says something great about your business, answer them – thank them, comment on the item they purchased. A great way to improve engagement even further and encourage reviews is to try different forms of media. Tools like video and voice offer an even more compelling story than a text-based 5-star review. Hearing the voice of a satisfied customer singing your praises is a great way to grow a strong reputation and expand your customer base.

Heyoya is a game-changing comments and reviews platform that brings voice to e-publishers and e-stores, improving sales and user engagement by allowing readers to express themselves beyond the medium of text. Heyoya’s new Receiver plan allows for quick and easy below-the-fold monetization through native advertising. Heyoya is a game changer for websites and is proven to increase brand affinity and the quality of user-generated content.